WTF?!?!? Bizzare behavior then flip and crash

locutus · Oct 25, 2015

So after waiting about a month for my motors to come, I have been flying cautiously to make sure all is ok with solo. I had a few flights and a scary incident whereas when I pressed RTH, It began to land at its current location? I hit pause and flew it in manually. A few other times it was flawless
.Then today...not so much. I was flying above a marsh about 15 to 20 feet up and 400 feet out when I lost signal. I have an ITElite antenna and my range has been great. It began to land at that location and I pressed pause a few times to get it up so it didnt land in the marsh.
It landed anyway then bounced a little so I decided to launch it and get it back up. It did go up and then I pressed RTH and recieved an audible alert saying solo crashed prior to actually flipping and crashing. Not happy.motors are packed with mud , props are done and the fuselage has a small crack. it still recieves GPS and shows it's ready to fly. UM..NO

DattaGroover · Oct 25, 2015

locutus said:
So after waiting about a month for my motors to come, I have been flying cautiously to make sure all is ok with solo. I had a few flights and a scary incident whereas when I pressed RTH, It began to land at its current location? I hit pause and flew it in manually. A few other times it was flawless
.Then today...not so much. I was flying above a marsh about 15 to 20 feet up and 400 feet out when I lost signal. I have an ITElite antenna and my range has been great. It began to land at that location and I pressed pause a few times to get it up so it didnt land in the marsh.
It landed anyway then bounced a little so I decided to launch it and get it back up. It did go up and then I pressed RTH and recieved an audible alert saying solo crashed prior to actually flipping and crashing. Not happy.motors are packed with mud , props are done and the fuselage has a small crack. it still recieves GPS and shows it's ready to fly. UM..NO

Bummer. See what 3DR customer support says. The good news is they will probably replace everything that has damage.

Earldgrayjr · Oct 25, 2015

locutus said:
So after waiting about a month for my motors to come, I have been flying cautiously to make sure all is ok with solo. I had a few flights and a scary incident whereas when I pressed RTH, It began to land at its current location? I hit pause and flew it in manually. A few other times it was flawless
.Then today...not so much. I was flying above a marsh about 15 to 20 feet up and 400 feet out when I lost signal. I have an ITElite antenna and my range has been great. It began to land at that location and I pressed pause a few times to get it up so it didnt land in the marsh.
It landed anyway then bounced a little so I decided to launch it and get it back up. It did go up and then I pressed RTH and recieved an audible alert saying solo crashed prior to actually flipping and crashing. Not happy.motors are packed with mud , props are done and the fuselage has a small crack. it still recieves GPS and shows it's ready to fly. UM..NO

Best way to understand is to open the logs. You can get Misdion Planner and do that. It will tell you what Solo was thinking.

nuggetz · Oct 26, 2015

You say you were flying about 15 to 20 feet up and 400 feet away? Thats kinda low to the ground so maybe you ran into some GPS reception issues and solo drifted and crashed. How do you know it was explicitly trying to LAND? Did it say it was landing on the controller or something? Also you have to have solid GPS for Pause to help you in an emergency. I'm thinking Solo went into Altitude hold mode and started drifting. Maybe it looked like it was trying to land unless it thought Home was right underneath it for some reason but I never heard that before. When you launched did you use GPS (did solo lock onto GPS and give the go-ahead to fly) or did you take off manually?

locutus · Oct 26, 2015

If the flight altitude was an issue. It should have RTH Which is set for 200 feet. Not land. I had excellent GPS signal.

Ryan Sandnes · Oct 26, 2015

Sounds kind of what happened to me, though I wasn't flying so low to the ground. My solo flew out of range on me and instead of coming home, it landed itself. Looking at the logs, you can physically see where it lost connection, where home was 'supposed' to be, but why it never returned I have no clue. Luckily for me where it decided to land was a soccer field a couple blocks away about 5 feet from a tree so there was no damage. I'm curious what the result is for you locutus, because I can vouch for part of your story that in fact the solo will decide to land instead of return home in some instances. Happy to send my logs if they need any kind of verification to help diagnose what is causing this, though I suspect they are already aware and hopefully on it=)

DattaGroover · Oct 26, 2015

Ryan Sandnes said:
Sounds kind of what happened to me, though I wasn't flying so low to the ground. My solo flew out of range on me and instead of coming home, it landed itself. Looking at the logs, you can physically see where it lost connection, where home was 'supposed' to be, but why it never returned I have no clue. Luckily for me where it decided to land was a soccer field a couple blocks away about 5 feet from a tree so there was no damage. I'm curious what the result is for you locutus, because I can vouch for part of your story that in fact the solo will decide to land instead of return home in some instances. Happy to send my logs if they need any kind of verification to help diagnose what is causing this, though I suspect they are already aware and hopefully on it=)

Yes, we are all hoping they are on it, Ryan. Thanks for posting this.

Earldgrayjr · Oct 26, 2015

locutus said:
If the flight altitude was an issue. It should have RTH Which is set for 200 feet. Not land. I had excellent GPS signal.

Did it say it was landing? Do the logs say it was landing? The only way to really know mega actually happened is look at the logs.

locutus · Oct 27, 2015

I sent the logs in to 3DR. Spoke with Aram. Nice guy. It appears #3 motor pod failed so they are covering all the damaget. I am so relieved.

Earldgrayjr · Oct 27, 2015

locutus said:
I sent the logs in to 3DR. Spoke with Aram. Nice guy. It appears #3 motor pod failed so they are covering all the damaget. I am so relieved.

Good for you!! They did the same for me in July. Luckily it was just that motor and another tha got caught in ivy..

DattaGroover · Oct 27, 2015

locutus said:
I sent the logs in to 3DR. Spoke with Aram. Nice guy. It appears #3 motor pod failed so they are covering all the damaget. I am so relieved.

Nice! That has been my experience with them as well.

Rick99 · Oct 31, 2015

I've had my Solo for over a month, I've flown it out over the ocean until it loses signal many times. Swamps too where I would never go to retributive it out of the water. It's a trooper. Never failed me.

But I had just taken off, was about 20' off the ground 20 feet away, and it just fell from the skies. Cool video. I was in a hurry to launch it, or I'd miss a shot, and I figured I didn't snap the battery all the way in, because it fell out when it hit the soft sand. Bent the Gimble arm but I bent it back in shape, and it works perfectly, four props and all was solved. But it does make me a wee bit nervous flying out over the ocean.

Really stupid question, is there a good system for retrieving and reading these here "logs"?

DattaGroover · Oct 31, 2015

I would send your logs into 3DR and ask them. I believe there is a fairly high rate of failure with the Solo's motor pods (compared to other drones, like the Phantoms).

THere is a free app from 3DR (well, not made by them, but sponsored by them) called Mission Planner. I would Google it, and read the instructions on how to download and use it. I have found it takes a good bit of practice to understand it. I'm starting to get it, but I have a long way to go still (I only started with it a few days ago).

Rick99 · Nov 4, 2015

Sent the logs to 3DR. I think, it's been a struggle. I have extracted them, it's the sending them at the moment that has rather inconvenient rules. I couldn't get mission planner to open the logs before, so now I have something to play with when I get the time.

I've stuck the rather short video on-line at...
Quantum Ad Outdoor
the props were spinning, at least some of them, I now remember that sand getting kicked up. Looks to me like the left front engine failed the way it spun over.

Couldn't have picked a better place to crash, that soft sand. Bent the gimbel arm almost 90deg to the side. I straightened it out with pliers. Need to give it a little twist in the z direction, camera's not quite where Solo thinks it is. Good metal to take that much bending without failure.

On the customer support, a tedious process so far, oh my goodness, but everyone raves about them...

Earldgrayjr · Nov 4, 2015

Rick99 said:
Sent the logs to 3DR. I think, it's been a struggle. I have extracted them, it's the sending them at the moment that has rather inconvenient rules. I couldn't get mission planner to open the logs before, so now I have something to play with when I get the time.

I've stuck the rather short video on-line at...
Quantum Ad Outdoor
the props were spinning, at least some of them, I now remember that sand getting kicked up. Looks to me like the left front engine failed the way it spun over.

Couldn't have picked a better place to crash, that soft sand. Bent the gimbel arm almost 90deg to the side. I straightened it out with pliers. Need to give it a little twist in the z direction, camera's not quite where Solo thinks it is. Good metal to take that much bending without failure.

On the customer support, a tedious process so far, oh my goodness, but everyone raves about them...

Looks like complete loss of power to me...

Rick99 · Nov 4, 2015

No, in slow motion, you can see sand getting kicked up on the last few frames. I'm about to upload a 960 pixels and HD version where each frame takes a second or two, so they can be conveniently paused. The big one is rendering so it'll be up, I'd guess, in a half hour.

Hard to say, a gyroscope, if you push it with your finger, it heads off at a right angle to that and the axis of spin. Perverse. (Right hand rule) So, it's hard to say, it's one of the front engines I think. And if you listen, you can hear a squeal, like a bearing or whatever.

Hey, this drone has spent about half it's time over the water. I've always been lucky.

Rick99 · Nov 4, 2015

Yeah, it seems to get quiet, except for the squeal, but in less than a second, it's spun 180 degrees and is upside down. Seems loss of power in all motors at the same time wouldn't do that. Maybe it lost power and then powered back up. Easy for 3DR to sort out I guess.

Rick99 · Dec 15, 2015

Ok, so I sent in the bent gimbel I had straightened out that worked ok, (needed to be bent a little more.) After a truly ornate character based, special network connection, repetitive downloading of logs, and producing videos and so on. Solo itself worked ok.

After a while I was told I also had to return Solo, I couldn't just return the gimbel. ?????

So, I sent that in, and here a month and a half later, after pestering them, am told that now I need to send the little camera holder and all the little diddle things that came with Solo too.

I told them to send it back, I'll fix it myself and if I can't, I'll buy a different one. That their guarantee is a joke. A bad joke.

Really wasted my time. Like dealing with the government. Every little nit-pick thing they can think of every step of the way. I guess they aren't doing well and they have to stick hurdles in your path to keep the number of returns down. But I didn't want to return Solo, they insisted I did. Infuriating. I will have done a lot of work, and will be without it for months, all for nothing, worse than nothing because I still don't have it back and I suspect if it does show back up, it will no longer work.

PdxSteve · Dec 15, 2015

My guess is they were going to send you a brand spanking new unit and just wanted the other left overs so they could refurb your current one. I am sorry you are having a bad experience.